Sorry about the delay since my last post. I was on holiday in Italy but am back and well rested. Very shortly before I left, to the point that I didn’t have time to write this up, I was invited to a very special tasting event. I recently posted about and evening that our whisky club, MMI had in conjunction with Sipil, a local importer and online retailer, who have recently begun to import Douglas Laing products to Israel, currently the only independent bottler on the market.

Way back at the beginning of the 20th century Sir Ernest Shackleton went on an exploratory expidition of Antarcta. Him and his team did many great things there, but among them he left some sealed whisky and brandy there.

Been meaning to get my hands on a sample of this one for a while. Green Label is a bit of an exception to the rest of the Johnnie Walker range in that it’s not a regular blend but a blended malt. According to their data it’s made up of Talisker, Linkwood, Cragganmore and Caol Ila, which on their own can be quite impressive whiskies.

This is a special release from Compass Box (AKA that independent bottler that is really good at sticking it to the SWA and making a fuss) to celebrate a decade of their Spice Tree expression. This one contains more aged components and a higher quantity of sherry casks in the mix.

This past week I attended a whisky tasting at Rozner’s Cellar in Kfar Saba. It’s a pretty interesting alcohol shop, they have a fair collection (by Israeli standards) of older whiskies including some real oddities, like a bottle of the Bailie Nicol Jarvie blend. They also hold the occasional tasting, this being the second I’ve attended there.

Compass Box, love or hate them, do some very very interesting things. This time they had some casks of whiskies originally intended for their Oak Cross blend, a blend of Clynelish, Dailuaine and Teaninich matured in refill casks, which after 12 years were put into a series of 16 casks, either virgin American or European oak, all charred to various levels.

I often find myself perusing around the various online whisky outlets even when I’m not looking to buy anything just to keep an idea of what’s on the market and prices and so forth. A while ago I started to notice these bottlings with what looked like distillery names which I’d never heard of made by something called the Lost Distillery Company. I was very intrigued but never got round to actually getting a bottle to try, there is quite an assortment and I was worried maybe I’d fall on one that wasn’t to my liking and so on.